Frozen Dinner
By Andre Farant
Copyright 2011 Andre Farant
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Frozen Dinner
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Frozen Dinner
Forget fire and brimstone, Hell was snow and ice. It was the hard-pack snow that crunched under foot and the ice crystals that formed on your beard. It was the snow that painted the world a uniform white and the ice that tossed you on your ass. Just then, and for the past four days, Fletcher would’ve given his left eye for fire and brimstone.
He stopped to squint into the endless night and his stomach growled, as though urging him on. A large shape, dark grey on pitch black, marred the horizon. It looked too symmetrical for an ice formation. Fletcher’s heart quickened and he started up again, hope cheerleading him from a trudge to a trot.
Whatever it was, that greyish lump wasn’t the station. It was the wrong shape for one, and the drill’s shaft was nowhere in sight. Even in the dark, Fletcher would’ve spotted the shaft a hundred yards and ten minutes ago, towering over the horizon like a naked flagpole.
In his triple-layered Canada Goose gear and heavy Merrels, Fletcher ran like a toddler, arms wide and feet clomp-clomping. The thing loomed larger. It was half-buried in snow, like a fat guy under a white comforter, and turned onto its side, one wing sticking out at a forty-five degree angle. The other wing had apparently been shorn off by the crash, lost to the night and a half-dozen inches of snow.
The plane was a smaller model; Fletcher guessed it seated about eight, maybe ten, plus the pilot and co-pilot. He brushed snow and rime off the craft’s grey skin, exposed the plane’s identification markings. The letters RA followed by a dash and a string of numbers. Under those though, were characters Fletcher recognized as Cyrillic. A Russian craft.
He took a few steps back, saw that he faced the aft side of the plane. If it had been coming from Russia and flying over Greenland then it would be pointed west, but if it had been returning home then it would be facing east, and if it had been off course when it crashed it could have been headed in any direction. No help at all.
But, Fletcher thought, it could at least serve as shelter and, more importantly, it might contain food. His stomach leaped, the gastric equivalent of a vigorous nod, and he searched the craft’s flank for a door. He found none, just a hole where a door had once been. Fletcher had to hoist himself in through the opening, given that, like the remaining wing, it was tilted upward, its threshold a good six feet above the ground. He barely made it, weak as he was.
His entrance was less than graceful, gravity pulling him along the plane’s angled floor and jamming his shoulder under one of the craft’s seats. Fletcher rolled into a sitting position and waited for his eyes to adjust to this new and improved darkness. Slowly, his surroundings began to take shape, like shy creatures venturing closer, out of the shadows. The seats were bravest, came into view first, then the bodies.
Fletcher took a deep breath and let it out slowly, watched it drift across the scene and dissipate. Oddly enough, he hadn’t even considered that the craft’s passengers might still be in there. He hadn’t really considered anything but, if he’d been called upon to do so, he’d have guessed the crew and passengers had survived the crash, walked away, and been rescued. But no; these guys, all one, two . . . five of them, were good and dead and still right here.
The first and nearest was a woman, splayed out on her back in the aisle between the seats, her head just a couple yards to the left of Fletcher’s feet. Two more were tangled in the seats beyond the woman, as though they’d been thrown from deep within the plane’s tail. To Fletcher’s right, the pilot was slumped in his seat, the co-pilot heaped across the controls and windshield.
Fletcher used the seat backs to pull his way up the aisle. He took a closer look at the woman as he half walked and half stumbled around her. Her face was a hardened mask of fear and pain, her arms positioned at odd angles, one leg hooked over a nearby seat. There was blood on her chin and her hips were twisted too far around but she was otherwise undamaged. Fletcher nudged her with a booted toe. She was unyielding as a statue; frozen stiff.
The two near the rear were the same: petrified, their skin covered in a thin layer of frost. These were worse off than the woman, though. One, a long-haired man draped over a seatback, was missing his lower jaw and right eye, the socket filled with a clump of pinkish slush, like cherry-flavoured sherbet. His right arm had too many elbows and his left arm ended at the wrist. Raw patches on his head and face exposed rotten flesh and splintered bone.
The second man lay across two seats, arms stretched out as though playing Superman, or reaching for the dead woman. This one’s legs were tangled together like a pretzel made in Hell’s bakery. His skull was split right down the middle and his lips were peeled back from blackened gums. Fletcher saw he was missing a front tooth.
Beyond the dead men, a large crate filled the plane’s tail section, its door open. Fletcher peered inside, hoping for food, any food, but the box was empty save for the long haired man’s lost left hand. He searched the overhead compartments but found only a silver briefcase and a couple of emergency kits. No food.
Like the others, the bodies of the pilots were frozen solid. The pilot’s forehead was cracked open, crystallized blood coating his face like a shroud. The co-pilot had evidently been tossed into the windshield, his face smashed and neck broken. No food.
Fletcher’s stomach turned over, emitted a weak rumble and was quiet, as though giving up. His last bowel movement had been over a day ago, maybe two. A hard little bolus which had produced no steam in the arctic air. Fletcher had stared at it for an upsettingly long time, wondering just how nutrient-rich the little coprolite might’ve been.
How could there be no food on the plane? Wherever they were flying to or from, it had to’ve been a fairly long trip. What did the passengers eat?
Fletcher pulled down the briefcase and one of the emergency kits. The briefcase yielded only papers covered in text which, even in the dark, Fletcher could see was Russian. The kit held basic medical supplies, a stiff blanket, a flare gun, and a couple of flares, but no food. Not even a protein bar.
“Crap.” His voice cracked and his vision blurred. The world spun, slow as a minute hand. He blinked, shook it off, nearly fell but caught himself on a seat.
No food in four days. Served him right for making the trip to the top of the world, where even rats’d have a hard time coming by food.
Of course, no way Fletcher would accept all of the blame. He’d be back in Denver, eyes on red, green and blue graphs sawing across his monitor, if not for the IGRIC expedition going far over schedule and into Greenland’s winter months, and if not for the funders losing their garbage and insisting someone fly up there to oversee their investment.
So Fletcher finds himself on a plane headed to temperatures that dip to negative fifty degrees Celsius and nights that last ninety days.
His first day at the International Greenland Ice Core station the others treat him like the scientific research expedition equivalent of Internal Affairs. But after the first forty-eight hours, they come to realize he isn’t there to shut them down or get them fired, that he wishes they’d hurry things along only because he wants to get back to Denver, back to his monitor, back to his graphs.
So they hurry things along and everyone’s happy.
And then Kathy Willis, one of the drillers, says the Northern Lights are out in full force, and Fletcher’s never seen the aurora borealis, so he runs out with the rest of them and it’s beautiful as all hell, like neon ribbon candy, and he climbs a hill to get a better view, which makes no sense since the lights are in the goddamn sky, and he slips, and he falls, and he falls some more, and when he finally picks himsel
f up and looks around, he sees only night-shrouded ice and snow. He shouts and then screams, but the wind scatters his voice across the ice shelf. He climbs the hill—a hill—but it’s evidently the wrong one. So he walks.
And that was four days ago and now Fletcher’s stomach felt both hollow and heavy, like an empty oil drum, and there was no food on this plane and Fletcher was as good as dead.
Fletcher gripped one of the flares, loaded it into the gun. He wasn’t ready to give up just yet. The others would be looking for him. They had Snowcats so, even if he’d been walking in exactly the wrong direction for the past four days, they’d have time enough to find him. They’d be out there right now.
He stuck his body out the doorless